Monthly Archives: June 2024

Books by the Author

#501: Characters Orienting

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #501, on the subject of Characters Orienting.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first ten Multiverser novels,

  1. Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel,
  2. Old Verses New,
  3. For Better or Verse,
  4. Spy Verses,
  5. Garden of Versers,
  6. Versers Versus Versers,
  7. Re Verse All,
  8. In Verse Proportion,
  9. Con Verse Lea, and
  10. In Version, in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley,

in serialized form on the web (those links will take you to the table of contents for each book).  Along with each book there was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; those posts are indexed with the chapters in the tables of contents pages.  Now as I am posting the eleventh, Con Version,  again written in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look may contain spoilers because it sometimes talks about my expectations for the futures of the characters and stories–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued, as being written partially concurrently with the story it sometimes discusses where I thought it was headed.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

This is the second post for this novel, covering chapters 13 through 24.  The previous behind-the-writings post is mark Joseph “young” web log post #498:  Characters Restart There is also a section of the site, Multiverser Novel Support Pages, in which I have begun to place materials related to the novels beginning with character papers for the major characters, giving them at different stages as they move through the books.  This is also the longest book to date, and has quite a few long chapters in it, so there will be quite a few of these background articles.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Return to Top

Quick links to discussions in this page:
Chapter 13, Takano 88
Chapter 14, Brown 286
Chapter 15, Cooper 5
Chapter 16, Takano 89
Chapter 17, Brown 287
Chapter 18, Cooper 6
Chapter 19, Takano 90
Chapter 20, Brown 288
Chapter 21, Cooper 7
Chapter 22, Takano 91
Chapter 23, Brown 289
Chapter 24, Cooper 8

Chapter 13, Takano 288

Eric wrote this to wrap up the mountain lion story.  In discussion we found that we were both a bit stymied regarding what to do with Tomiko, but he had several suggestions.

Return to Top

Chapter 14, Brown 286

We discussed a string of events from which we outlined about five or six chapters of Derek’s story, including hunting for food, meeting the as yet unnamed trombone player whom we had detailed some already and the owner of a local restaurant whom we had barely touched on the details.  I started this chapter based on the first part of that outline.  Eric took over with teaching Vashti to clean the rabbit.

We also began to discuss what time of year it was, and agreed that we wanted the climax to come at Mardi Gras but we weren’t sure how much lead time we needed before that.

Return to Top

Chapter 15, Cooper 5

We were struggling with having to do all the dialogue in German, which not only do neither of us speak, we don’t expect most readers to understand and we also have the difficulty that our viewpoint character doesn’t speak it well so sometimes we can’t explain what was said.  I decided that there could be a reason why Hans could speak English, so I put it into the story.

Return to Top

Chapter 16, Takano 89

I had asked Eric whether he wanted to do anything else with the reading from the Gospel of John before we chose a next book for the weekly service, and he produced this issue of praying for a net full of fish.

Return to Top

Chapter 17, Brown 287

Adjusting the outline slightly, Eric had Derek and Vashti meet Hannah Johnson, who came by looking for Mister Hunter and Maurice Howland, the trombone player.  She offers them fifty cents a day plus lunch to play at her restaurant at lunch time, and recommends that Maurice would be a good addition to their group.

Return to Top

Chapter 18, Cooper 6

Eric had designated Cooper’s first universe as “Earth One”, which I changed based on my own consideration of how that could be determined.  Eric also included this note:  Authors’ Note: Matterhorn was first ascended by a team led by Englishman Edward Whymper on July 14, 1865 on what Barrelmaster would call Prime Earth.

Much of this sprang from my suggestion that Cooper would insist on helping in some way, although Eric figured out what Cooper might be able to do to help.

Return to Top

Chapter 19, Takano 90

Eric had raised the question at the end of the previous Takano chapter, and I meditated on it overnight.  It happened that I had just completed teaching (at the Christian Gamers Guild Chaplain’s Bible Study) the last chapter of the Gospel of John, so the events were fresh in my mind.  I put together this as a sermon rather than as her thoughts to communicate it more effectively.

Return to Top

Chapter 20, Brown 288

I wrote this.  I had to look up what andouille sausage was, and figure out how it went together with rice and beans, but hopefully I got it right.

Return to Top

Chapter 21, Cooper 7

Eric wrote this.  In brief editorial discussion we agreed that on well-traveled paths and roads in the mountains Cooper would walk about four miles per hour, about thirty percent faster than average walkers.  We also decided that Tell raised goats before the cheese press burned down, and still has a few from which he gets a bit of milk before breakfast, and then releases them to graze on the mountain slopes.

Return to Top

Chapter 22, Takano 91

We were both a bit uncertain about Tommy’s story, but I recognized it was inevitable that she would begin teaching from another book, not unreasonable for her to hit Acts, and plausible that she would find lessons from their early efforts to form a community that she could apply to their community.  It still was a bit of a struggle to pull those lessons out of the text.

Return to Top

Chapter 23, Brown 289

We had copious notes on things that were going to happen to Derek, and just needed to get them in some kind of sequence.  I wanted to write this to bring Maurice Howland into the band.

The handshake is a subtle indicator that it’s not normal in New Orleans at this time for whites to touch blacks, and that blacks are aware of the affront.

Return to Top

Chapter 24, Cooper 8

Working from a rough outline he had proposed, Eric put together this chapter in which Wilhelm sneaks into town to do business, and Cooper feels like there is something dishonest happening.  He resolved it and sent Cooper into the neighborhood to do some sightseeing, but we had some uncertainties involving several possible directions.

Return to Top

This has been the second behind-the-writings look at Con Version.  If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with more behind-the-writings posts and another novel.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#500: A Five Cent Review

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #500, on the subject of A Five Cent Review.

As I was posting the four hundred forty-ninth mark Joseph “young” web log post, I realized I was approaching half a thousand, and wondered whether I should do something to note that milestone.  I decided that a quick look back picking out some of my favorite posts might be worth the effort.  If you missed these, well, I won’t say that there weren’t other good posts nor even that these are all necessarily the best, only that they are the ones I remember fondly.

Unfortunately, on my first pass through those original four hundred forty-nine posts, I marked sixty-five as significant in one way or another, and realized that I would be publishing another fifty before I hit the milestone in question, so I was going to have to go back and read quite a few articles and pare down the list a bit.  I did remove some of those originally included, but I added one or two as well.  Hopefully I’ve succeeded in producing something of quality.

Of course, I have made a practice since this mark Joseph “young” web log began of posting an annual review of almost everything I published over the previous year, here or elsewhere.  The most recent one was #490:  Looking Back, and the previous ones are linked from there.

  1. I test, politically, as a moderate slightly left of center, but I hold a number of more conservative views; one of those is on abortion.  I somewhere suggested that conservatives needed to find way to promote and explain their views to people on the fence, and this, #7:  The Most Persecuted Minority, was a proposed television spot.  It was eventually turned into a radio spot and aired on Lift-FM for a while.
  2. Also on the subject of abortion, #9:  Abolition compares the pro-life movement to the abolition of slavery, in an unexpected way.
  3. #10:  The Unimportance of Facts is my proposed explanation for why voters don’t care what the facts actually are, only whether the politician holds the same views as themselves.
  4. Written a few days after my father died, #51:  In Memoriam on Groundhog Day memorializes him with my recollections.
  5. Having read that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg (now deceased) believed that abortion should be strictly a woman’s decision as an equal protection right (and not a privacy right to be decided by her and her doctor), I wrote #63:  Equal Protection When Boy Meets Girl, suggesting that in regard to unexpected pregnancies most of the advantages are with the mothers.
  6. I’m glad I wrote #65:  Being Married, because I have referred quite a few young couples to it in the years since.  It is a collection of some of the best marital advice I ever received, and worth a read even if you’ve been married as long as I have.
  7. #72:  Being an Author discusses how to identify such a person, that is, how to know whether you can call someone, including yourself, an author, or indeed a poet, artist, or musician.
  8. Having read that Neil DeGrasse Tyson stated it was highly likely that the universe was a similation, I suggested in #76:  Intelligent Simulation that this was entirely inconsistent with his assertion that the theory of intelligent design was not scientific.  The article quotes from my then-pending book Why I Believe.
  9. A satirical article becomes the springboard for a consideration of #79:  Normal Promiscuity, which looks at the fact that what were once identified as illicit and abberant sexual liasons because they were dangerous are now embraced and encouraged as normative.
  10. I genuinely enjoyed writing #83:  Help!  I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!, a satirical look at the notion that our gender is dependent on something we believe about ourselves.
  11. #84:  Man-Made Religion challenges the notion that the diversity of religions demonstrates that they are all human inventions.
  12. A famous landmark ice cream shop in Milwaukee faced a protest and a boycott when the owner would not permit customers to order in Spanish, and in #87:  Spanish Ice Cream I explain why expecting him to do so is unreasonable.
  13. #88:  Sheep and Goats explains why the popular parable is so badly misunderstood and what it really means.
  14. I almost cut this one as I reread it, but it struck me that #90:  Footnotes on Guidance, as a recounting of my own experiences, might be useful to those whom God is leading to places they did not expect to go.
  15. #93:  What Is a Friend? describes two different understandings of what constitutes friendship, and how that matters.
  16. The notion of government taxing the rich to help the poor is put into perspective in #105:  Forced Philanthropy, asking whether we want the government eagerly awaiting our deaths so it can spend our money.
  17. I wrote what I consider a very valuable nine-part series about ministry, how to recognize and identify it, and how music sometimes fits into it.  The last of those, #107:  Miscellaneous Music Ministries, is not the best of them nor the most useful, but it does briefly identify and link the other eight, and so is the easiest to include here.  I would recommend the entire series, but usually find myself recommending specific entries in it which relate to particular ministries.
  18. Reacting to a discussion of my previously mentioned article on forced philanthropy, #108:  The Value of Ostentation looks at how ostentation actually helps the poor, and why it is a bit illogical to object to it.
  19. I explain why so much current popular Christian music is comprised of simplistic songs, and why this is not so bad a thing as good musicians tend to think, in #109:  Simple Songs.
  20. #114:  Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles responds to the argument that God cannot exist if He allows priests to abuse children.
  21. Inspired by a television show, #115:  Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference applies it to reality, noting that people who deny a connection between environmental factors and homosexuality are ignoring facts.
  22. #120:  Giving Offense is primarily about tolerance, that it does not mean declining to state opinions but only willingness to respect those with whom we disagree.
  23. #126:  Equity and Religion addresses the argument that governments should not provide funding for pre-school education run by religious organizations.
  24. #130:  Economics and Racism explains why racism, by and against everyone, rises when economic conditions fall.
  25. #132:  Writing Horror gives a few tips on writing horror stories and running horror in games which must be worth reading, because Places to Go, People to Be republished it in French as Maîtriser l’Horreur.
  26. A misunderstanding of what it is to be “racist” inspired the composition of #135:  What Racism Is, clarifying that blacks and other non-whites can be and frequently are racist against whites, and that assuming that because someone is white she is racist is a racist assumption.
  27. I wrote a four-part miniseries on the sin and judgment in the first chapter of Romans.  The fourth part, #141:  The Solution to the Romans I Problem, links and summarizes the first three, and gives the solution, that we Christians need to repent of our hidden idolatry.
  28. Responding to a foolish statement from PETA, #162:  Furry Thinking discusses the proper relationship between humans and animals.
  29. In the 70s and 80s I asked a lot of major contemporary Christian musicians their advice for anyone wanting to do what they do, and in #163:  So You Want to Be a Christian Musician I consider the best of that advice, and what we should really want.
  30. I refer people to #168:  Praying For You frequently–whenever someone asks me to pray for them–as it explains what I think is a correct understanding of the obligations created by such prayer requests.
  31. I was hesitant to write #193:  Yelling:  An Introspection, which discusses the futility of yelling and the negative counter-productive impact it has, but several readers thanked me for it.
  32. I would be remiss were I not to mention at least one article about temporal anomalies, and my list includes #199:  Time Travel Movies That Work, a few films in which the outcome is not disastrous.
  33. #200:  Confederates actually argues that the American Civil War was about modern issues like state drug policy and immigration rules.
  34. #207:  The Gender Identity Trap suggests that the idea that someone can be a different gender inside than their physical sex is entirely about prejudices and stereotypes, with nothing to support it in reality.
  35. #208:  Halloween is one of two articles I wrote about the holiday (the other Faith in Play #11:  Halloween) examining Christian attitudes toward it.
  36. Following up on #207:  The Gender Identity Trap, #212:  Gender Subjectivity observes that no one can know that he feels like the wrong gender inside, because that isn’t more than that he doesn’t feel the way he thinks society expects him to feel, and in this case society is simply wrong.
  37. #215:  What Forty-One Years of Marriage Really Means is an addendum to the previous #65:  Being Married, providing an important understanding of what it means that marriage is a covenant, not a contract.
  38. #216:  Why Are You Here? answers the existential question, that is, why do we exist.
  39. #230:  No Womb No Say challenges the notion that men, not having uteruses, should not be able to express an opinion about abortion, by raising a different issue in which men lack the requisite anatomy but still are expected to express an opinion.
  40. #239:  A Departing Member of the Christian Gamers Guild answers suggestions that involvement in fantasy role playing games is detrimental for Christian faith.
  41. #245:  Unspoken Prayer Requests explains why I think they are theologically invalid.
  42. In June of 2019, after attending The Objective Session of The Extreme Tour, I began publishing my songs on this web log.  I ranked about forty of them based on music, lyrics, and the quality of the performance and recording I had available, and began with the one I thought (with a bit of input from one of my sons) best, #301:  The Song “Holocaust”.  It includes a link to a recording of the song.  Additional songs are chained beginning with the second, at the bottom of the article.
  43. #309:  Racially Discriminatory Ticketing highlights and explains a blatant example of racial discrimination by blacks against whites.
  44. In March of 2018 I began a miniseries about early contemporary Christian and Christian rock musicians, still ongoing, with Larry Norman.  Two years later the thirty-ninth entry in that series focused on one of the best bands of the eighties, #342:  Fireworks Times Five, with extensive links to videos from all four of their excellent albums.  It also links the previous thirty-eight such articles.
  45. In 2020, after COVID-19 caused the cancellation of the live Origins game festival, Black Lives Matter protestors demanded that the corporation running the gaming convention make a public statement in support of their position or face a boycott, which shut down efforts to launch an online convention.  #344:  Is It O.K. Not to Make a Statement? attacks this divisive and destructive policy as a blow against the constitutional right not to speak about something.
  46. A frustrated musician asked the question on a Christian music Facebook group, and I offered an answer in #352:  Why No One Cares About Your Songs, which I think might be a must-read for those who aspire to any creative endeavor.
  47. In the discussion of the polarization of America, I suggest in #375:  Fixing the Focus that many Christians have our eyes on the wrong things.
  48. The old economic principle derived from sheep grazing on common land finds a new and problematic application in the world of online retailing, elucidated in #377:  A New Tragedy of the Common.
  49. Normally I link reviews, but this one was sent to me privately, and was the first review I saw of my book Why I Believe, so I feel I would be remiss if I failed to mention my reprinting of it in #386:  An Unsolicited Private Review.
  50. A popular song, a friend’s pregnancy, and the recollection of a spoiled surprise party prompted me to write #394:  Unplanned, suggesting that there aren’t really any accidents, and, again, talking about abortion.
  51. The question was asked, specifically in relation to worship, and I offered an answer in that context which extends beyond it, explaining #396:  Why Music Matters.
  52. #406:  Internet Racism gives reasons for rejecting the call (in Great Britain) that those who post racial slurs against the poor performance of black athletes should be brought up on criminal charges.
  53. I was personally asked to respond to a long article giving ten reasons why the Biblical account of the exodus was untrue, so I wrote an eleven-part miniseries.  It concluded with #425:  Do Similarities Between the Accounts of Moses’ Birth and Certain Myths Make Him a Fictional Character?, which also links and briefly summarizes the ten previous articles.
  54. One of my patrons asked me for #426:  A Christian View of Horror, which suggests that to some degree it can be embraced, but ultimately there is one insurmountable problem.
  55. #429:  Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts speaks of the legacy of a small school whose campus has been almost completely obliterated by time.
  56. A couple decades back, the respected Australian role playing e-zine Places to Go, People to Be launched a French edition, and asked my permission to translate articles I had written for them to release in another language, and subsequently to do so with articles I had published through other sites.  Late in 2021 I finally got around to compiling a linked list of what was was then twenty-six translated articles, in #431:  Mark Joseph Young En Français.
  57. #434:  Foolish Wisemen draws a lesson about celebrating Christmas versus the rest of the story from the account of these visitors.
  58. #444:  Ability versus Popularity discusses contests in which the public is asked to vote for the best, and contestants encourage friends who know nothing of the competitors to vote for a friend.
  59. I had recently seen the argument that laws restricting abortion were an impingement on the religious practice of Jewish women, and since I had heard the same argument decades before in Senate hearings I wrote #446:  The Religious Freedom Abortion Argument, and decided to include it here.
  60. #449:  Cruel and Unusual is not exactly about the death penalty and expresses no opinion on it, but does find fault with the protest that opposes it by attempting to make it more painful.
  61. #459:  Publication Anticipation provided a list of my books recently published in 2021-2 plus my expectations for 2023 and beyond.  Those mentioned there which have been published since are listed in the 2023 review article mentioned at the top of this page.
  62. I’m listing #469:  Church History because it was an answer to the last question I was asked by my long-time friend John Mastick which I answered in a web log post before he died.  His question was about what distinguished Calvinists, Pentecostals, and Charismatics from each other, and I threw in Catholics, Lutherans, and Evangelicals for clarity.  He had previously prompted #413:  The Abomination of Desolation and #465:  Believing in Ghosts.
  63. The issue arose in our study of the Gospel According to Mark in the Christian Gamers Guild’s Chaplain’s Bible Study, leading to an expanded exploration of it in #475:  The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter, which I contend is the woman cured of bleeding in the healing nested in the middle of that miracle account.
Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#499: Temporal Anomalies in Dean Koontz’ Lightning

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #499, on the subject of Temporal Anomalies in Dean Koontz’ Lightning.

A time travel fan wrote to me praising a book and asking me to review it.  The book is by thriller author Dean Koontz, and it is a compelling and exciting story–however, I was less enthused about the time travel elements.  You can read my book review at Goodreads, if you wish.

I was suspicious from the start.  We have in essence two central characters, Laura and Stephan.  Stephan is a time traveler.  I’m not certain that this is obvious from the beginning, because of course I was told up front that it was a time travel story, so I was anticipating that.  However, we begin with Laura’s birth.  Her mother’s obstetrician had become an alcoholic, but had kept that secret, and apparently in the original history the delivery of Laura went very badly–we ultimately learn that she was born paralyzed from the waist down, and her mother died.  In the version of the story we see, Stephan arrives at the doctor’s home and forces him to call the hospital and report that he cannot come perform the delivery because he is drunk, and the doctor on call would have to do it.  Although her mother still dies, Laura is born healthy.

The complication I have is that somehow Stephan knows that the doctor is going to botch the delivery, and so travels to this time and place to prevent it.  That means he is relying on information from the future to change the past, and in so doing is erasing the events in the future which are the basis of his knowledge.

Koontz attempts to get around this by stating that a time traveler cannot change his own past and indeed cannot travel to his own past, he can only travel to points in his future and return to his own time, but he can always change his future.  Stephan is part of a World War II German experiment in time travel in 1944, and all of his visits to Laura are in his future, in that sense.  However, if he travels to 1964 and discovers that Laura was murdered in 1963, how is that not his past, and if he then travels to 1963 and prevents that murder, has he not changed his past–and how is it that his visit to 1964 can reveal a murder that never happened because he traveled to 1963 to prevent it?

The book is full of such complications.  It also has a few more difficult ones.  It is an interesting twist that when the German secret service is trying to find Laura they travel to the future and search police reports and newspaper archives looking for a time and place at which she will appear.  However, ultimately they learn that she was pulled over by a patrol car on highway 111 at a certain date and time, so they launch a team to meet her there and kill her, and on the way they kill the patrolman who was going to file that report.  How, then, did they read the report?

There were two other quirks, both based on the notion that nature or fate is self-preserving.

Stating that nature prevents paradox, Stephan explains that it is not possible for a time traveler to travel to a time and place he has already been.  However, in the critical scene he arrives at the critical location, realizes he is too late, returns to his own time, and reprograms the machine to deliver him five minutes sooner–but it won’t, which is explained that if he arrives five minutes sooner he might still be there in five minutes when his other self arrives, which would create a paradox.  How, though, would the machine, or nature, recognize that although he is not present at the desired coordinates, he will be there in a few minutes?

The other quirk is that it is often repeated that fate tries to reassert itself–what was meant to happen, if prevented by a time traveler, will happen later a different way.  That occurs sometimes during the story, and sometimes it looms over the story as a threat but is somehow avoided.  I can’t help feeling, though, that this fate, or nature, or whatever it is, has elements of a divine being, someone who knows what was supposed to happen and has the power to make it happen.

Were I to name one other problem, it is evident that Stephan has seriously changed Laura’s life.  The weird thing is she is still a best-selling author, but the books of hers which he read are not the books she wrote.  Further, he fell in love with the character of the author, but I can’t help wondering whether that character would have been altered by such details as that she did not spend her life in a wheel chair, and she was not rescued from a rapist-murderer by a mysterious stranger as a young girl.  I can’t help thinking she would have been a different person, but it seems she did not change.

Overall, poor marks on the time travel elements despite being a very compelling book.

Books by the Author

#498: Characters Restart

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #498, on the subject of Characters Restart.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first ten Multiverser novels,

  1. Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel,
  2. Old Verses New,
  3. For Better or Verse,
  4. Spy Verses,
  5. Garden of Versers,
  6. Versers Versus Versers,
  7. Re Verse All,
  8. In Verse Proportion,
  9. Con Verse Lea, and
  10. In Version, in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley,

in serialized form on the web (those links will take you to the table of contents for each book).  Along with each book there was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; those posts are indexed with the chapters in the tables of contents pages.  Now as I am posting the eleventh, Con Version,  again written in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look may contain spoilers because it sometimes talks about my expectations for the futures of the characters and stories–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued, as being written partially concurrently with the story it sometimes discusses where I thought it was headed.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

This is the first post for this novel, covering chapters 1 through 12.  There is also a section of the site, Multiverser Novel Support Pages, in which I have begun to place materials related to the novels beginning with character papers for the major characters, giving them at different stages as they move through the books.  This is also the longest book to date, and has quite a few long chapters in it, so there will be quite a few of these background articles.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Return to Top

Quick links to discussions in this page:
Chapter 1, Takano 84
Chapter 2, Brown 282
Chapter 3, Cooper 1
Chapter 4, Takano 85
Chapter 5, Brown 283
Chapter 6, Cooper 2
Chapter 7, Takano 86
Chapter 8, Brown 284
Chapter 9, Cooper 3
Chapter 10, Takano 87
Chapter 11, Brown 285
Chapter 12, Cooper 4

Chapter 1, Takano 284

We had just finished the final readthrough edit of In Version, and although we weren’t in a hurry to continue we had agreed to work together on the next probably two books, this one picking up Tomiko’s story and continuing Derek’s, and the next one returning to Slade and Beam.  We had agreed that the second chapter would be the continuation of Derek’s spooky New Orleans world, but the first would bring Tommy back, so I wrote this to recall the end of Tommy’s story in Con Verse Lea and did a quick edit to a chapter Eric had written, part of which had been included in In Version, to make this a continuation of that.

Titles are always a conundrum for me, and my suggestion for this one came from a long chain of reasoning.  In Versers Versus Versers there were five versers in the same world and they were at war against each other, and nearly all of them were versed out by the end of the book.  That was the inspiration for the title Re Verse All, that almost everyone had versed once again.  That book, though, only covered Lauren Hastings, Tommy Takano, and James Beam, and so when it ended and the next one dropped all three of them and picked up Joe Kondor, Bob Slade, and Derek Brown, it made sense to call it In Verse Proportion.  I then swapped back to the other three characters and had much of the action centered around a lake in a meadow, which logically fit the title Con Verse Lea.  The tenth book returned to Kondor, Slade, and Brown, but they were all in the same universe and this was continuing the story from In Verse Proportion, so I named it In Version.  Pondering a title for this book, I realized that readers have been waiting to hear what happens to Tommy, so this is in one sense a continuation of Con Verse Lea, and it would probably be the only time that the title Con Version made sense.

Return to Top

Chapter 2, Brown 282

Eric had written a chapter as a proposed New Orleans world where Derek could get the trumpet I wanted him to have eventually.  I had thought it sounded like an excellent and very different setting, but wanted to split it so that a short part of it would be a cliffhanger ending for In Version and the story would continue in a subsequent book.  Because there were good arguments for interrupting most of the other stories, we put the continuation here.

Return to Top

Chapter 3, Cooper 1

There was a fair amount of uncertainty about who should be the third character in this book.  Slade’s story would be continuing the alien empire where he and Derek had been involved in the very intense combat tournament, and because it had so many ties to both the parakeet world and the space traveling aliens of the previous books we wanted to break away from that and return later.  We weren’t sure what to do with Beam but that he had been a viewpoint character in several recent books so we thought he should be out for a while.  I had wanted to shelve Lauren for a few books, mostly because I needed a break from her.  Kondor was continuing the story Slade had started in an earlier book, and it felt like the parakeet world needed a break.  The suggestion was made that we launch a new character, and there was a player who reportedly hoped we would base a character on him.  At the same time we thought the best solution to Tommy’s problems would be to bring a character into her world who could bring survival skills they didn’t have.  That could be Kondor, but we had set him up for an interesting and challenging storyline where he was, so he would be arriving somewhat later.  Johnny Angel was a possibility, because his background was at this point vague enough with enough of a suggestion of a long history in the verse that we could fill in a lot of skills.  Or it could be the new verser.  I was hesitant to create another new verser, because the six presently in use already meant a lot more skipping.  But it was an option, and in the end we designed a character loosely on a player who had been in games with both of us and had suggested to Eric that he be included.

Even so, there were a lot of points to debate.  We changed the name, but the original player used an English translation of his German name, and we wanted to retain that as well–but we made this decision before we decided to introduce him in Switzerland, which complicated the name use very early.  I suggested that he would be black, mostly for racial diversity, but also because his very conservative Evangelical Christian faith fit with a black man.  Eric agreed, but said he was also part German, which seemed good.  There was a discussion concerning whether he might maintain his physical shape by participating in a martial art; the original player did not do so, but taught himself to fight in one of his early worlds.  There are several advantages in game terms to having such skills, but we decided he was a strong enough character without them.  At first I had given him a Bible, but the player provided notes in which he suggested that he didn’t use books, instead relying on his laptop, so that was changed.

I had long thought that having a character meet William Tell and learn the use of the crossbow from him was as promising as having someone learn the longbow from Robin Hood.  The player had been in Sherwood Forest as one of his first worlds, but I had used Sherwood in Verse Three, Chapter One, and even though no one learned to use the bow I was reluctant to use the same world for a different character.  Still, I had mentioned this, along with several others, and Eric decided to run with this one, partly because it had religious issues alongside the political ones.

We also decided that Barrelmaster would have seen Slade verse out, and then followed the scriff sense to Umak Tek, where he would have stayed for some time before being versed out; we did not decide on anything he did there, or what killed him.

I was a bit bothered by the notion that Barrelmaster was already at Stage Two, the stage at which versers have weird dreams when versing, but decided to let it slip, as it was possible.

Return to Top

Chapter 4, Takano 85

We had some trouble getting the Takano story moving.  I was short on ideas, and while Eric made up for this he was not on top of either the geography and environment of an unspoiled southern New Jersey area where this was set, or the specifics of Tommy’s skills and equipment and those of her companions.  There were a lot of rewrites in the early chapters.

Return to Top

Chapter 5, Brown 283

Eric created the confrontation with the bull and the damage to the robot.  The development of the new telepathy to animals skill was a good extrapolation from what he knew.

For a long time I was very bothered by the notion that a bull could gore the outer shell of a robot made of Duralloy, one of those super hard science fiction materials that can withstand bullets and meteoroids, but I let it stand.  Ultimately it appears that the bull is supernaturally gifted.  I was still vexed by the problem of how Derek could repair it.  Ultimately I undid the goring.

Return to Top

Chapter 6, Cooper 2

Eric had launched Cooper, and wrote this as well.  The use of German was an unusual touch, but made sense in the setting.

Eric had envisioned Cooper going for a short walk outside the confines of Umak Tek and being killed (presumably by a coral bush?), and thus being separated from his possessions and needing to recover them.  That meant some wandering in the mountain, but it was something already in the character’s backstory.

Return to Top

Chapter 7, Takano 86

The mountain lion story was Eric’s idea.  The animal was plausible; there are such lions in the northern mountains, and they could spread south.  However, we had to hammer out a lot of details related to where it would be and how Tommy would find it.

Return to Top

Chapter 8, Brown 284

I wrote this.  We had agreed that Derek would get his trumpet in this world, and that it would be integral to the story, given to him by a person who seemed ordinary but at the same time was mysterious.  At this point I created Pierre Hunter as an old black man who had been the protector of New Orleans and was retiring as Derek would be the one to face and hopefully defeat the devil.  He would be expecting them, and would have the trumpet for Derek.

I have never actually seen a four-valve trumpet, but they make four-valve brass instruments and I understand the use of the fourth valve from playing a four-valve tuba; I wanted this to be recognizably special and yet for practical purposes a regular trumpet, so I went with that.

Our discussions about this world, while we were still working on In Version, included that part of the battle would have Derek leading a Dixieland band in the song When the Saints Go Marching In.  It struck me that a Dixieland band usually has a woodwind player, a clarinet or saxophone most typically, that plays what in a Sousa march would be called the descant and would be played on flutes and piccolos, and so I did some quick research into ancient Persian woodwinds.  That gave me the Ney, very like a recorder but made in multiple sizes so it can play in different keys.  It seemed the sort of thing a young Arabian princess would be expected to learn, and this would enable Vashti to play along with Derek.

I also decided to give them the house as a base of operations.

We also sketched several points still to come, including the members of the band and some of the events at the story’s climax.

Return to Top

Chapter 9, Cooper 3

Trying to pick up where Eric was headed with the William Tell story, I wrote enough of this to gather the equipment and bring Cooper within sight of the Tell homestead.  My description was limited to the fact that there was a house, a stable for the donkey, and the wagon parked outside.  At that point I stopped to raise a question about the setting.  Traditions surrounding Tell disagree as to whether he was a peasant with a crossbow (presumably for hunting) or a gentleman living outside the city.  That had to be decided before his residence could be further described, so I waited for input from Eric on it.  We agreed on the nobleman status, and I continued.

Return to Top

Chapter 10, Takano 87

Eric wrote this, with conflicting plans and the odd result that the opinion of the three team leaders outvoted the separate opinions of the three group leaders, and the consequent outcome that they were going to attempt to trap a mountain lion.

Return to Top

Chapter 11, Brown 285

I was moving the music side of the Brown story forward, and wanted to build the foundation for a Dixieland band.  Sousa March trios and Dixieland standards have very similar structure, and I don’t remember much of either repertoire, but it was a start.

Return to Top

Chapter 12, Cooper 4

Eric picked up the dinner.

At one point I commented that I was relying on an online translation program to give me the German for Cooper 3; Eric responded that he was also using that translation program.  We could only hope that our snippets of German are close enough for the purpose.

Return to Top

This has been the first behind-the-writings look at Con Version.  If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with more behind-the-writings posts and another novel.

Games

#497: Game Ideas Unlimited: Vivid Recovered

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #497, on the subject of Game Ideas Unlimited:  Vivid, Recovered.

Decades ago I was writing the weekly Game Ideas Unlimited series at Gaming Outpost.  It was in the main lost when that site crashed.  Then about six years ago the monthly series RPG-ology launched, and the webmaster at the Christian Gamers Guild said he hoped to see ideas from the earlier series revived.  I had a few saved on my drive, and converted them to repost, and rewrote a few from remembered ideas.  Then editors at the French edition of Places to Go, People to Be discovered that quite a bit of the series was preserved at the Internet Archive, and provided information for me to access it.  Conversion of many of the articles to the new series began, with an effort to keep them in the original sequence, although interspersed with new material.

However, some of the earlier ideas were recreated in articles in the new series before these were recovered.  In some cases, it made sense later to recover the original as a new entry.  However, the rewritten RPG-ology #15:  Vivid was similar enough to the original Game Ideas Unlimited version that a second article on the same point would be overly redundant.  Still, I was reluctant to lose the original.  Hence I made the decision to include here: Game Ideas Unlimited:  Vivid

[Five weeks A few months] ago, in an episode of [this the RPG-ology] series entitled Senseless, I spoke of my terrifying trip through Skinner’s Falls during the flood.  Then I told it in order to look at those moments at which we are completely robbed of our ability to think or act; but I also said that I usually tell it for another reason, and that when I do I tell it with another story.

This is that other story.

We were hiking through some caves.  The plan had been for us to enter in one place and exit from another, so we had our gear with us.  But things did not go well; a weak ceiling collapsed, and we were cut off from our guide.  We were not certain even whether our guide had survived.  Fortunately we had food and water, and some reliable lamps which would last quite a while if we were careful.  So for lack of a better plan, we began exploring the caves beyond where we were in search of an escape route.

We kept pushing ourselves, exhausting every path we found.  But eventually we were faced with the possibility that there was no other exit.

There was one chance.  We had at one point come to what we had ruled a dead end; but it was not a dead end–there was a crevice, a wide crack in the floor like something from the mines of Moria, and another passage on the other side.  The heat rising from this fissure was intense, but the way it split there were islands, pillars, fragments of floor between us and the far side.  There were also stalactites within reach above us, good heavy ones that would probably suffice for safety lines.  We had rope; we had other gear.  It appeared that we would either cross here, or wait in the hope that someone would dig us out.

Over the course of the next several hours we built a pair of makeshift bridges–catwalks, really.  We doused ourselves with water to help tolerate the heat.  Plotting a route across the gap, one at a time we moved from the edge to one of the nearest columns, to another, moving the bridges.  We tied ropes around our waists and had someone hold the other end; we tied ropes to stalactites as well as we could, and used these for extra security.  It seemed like hours.

In the end, all six of us collapsed in the corridor on the far side.  We were not out yet–we would still face several obstacles–but we would never forget this.  I can still see the makeshift bridges, the eerie light from the depths, the exhausted look on the face of my Yazirian friend as he collapsed next to me.

That’s right, it was a game.  You probably knew that–there are enough things in it that are unrealistic even with my editing.  We had built the bridges from strange mushroom-like growths we found in the caves; the pillars were huge crystals, and the crevice was flowing with hot magma about thirty meters below us, and we made a two hundred meter crossing.  But I remember it.  I remember it vividly–I see these things in my mind’s eye, as clearly as the images I see of Skinner’s Falls, the four-foot walls of water coming at me as I stared helplessly into the surf.  The place comes alive in my mind, as if I had been there.

Total Recall [(1990)] suggested the idea that when a vacation is over all you really have of it is the memory of the vacation.  Thus if you don’t have the time or the money to take a truly exotic vacation, you can spend a couple of hours at a memory implant center and have them tailor the memory of a wonderful holiday.  You never actually experience the trip itself, but you have the ability to go back over it in your mind, recalling the high points and telling people what you never did.  It is a brilliant idea, and if the technology is ever developed I’m sure it will become very popular.

But we have something of that reality now.  Through our role playing games, we visit exotic places.  We can visit Mars, Titan Colony, even Middle Earth and Talislanta–places that don’t exist at all save in the minds of people; yet in our memories they are as real as anything else we remember.

And normally having told both stories and explained that the second is from a game, I would say that this is one of the great things I enjoy about games:  that I remember going places and doing things that were completely impossible, yet the memory is the same as if they were real.  It is one of the great things that sells me on this hobby.  But today I’m going to push beyond that point to something else.

Why is that game moment so clear in my memory?  There are other game moments I can call to mind–the time I in desperation challenged a skeletal warrior to a psychic duel to save the lives of my party, the time the illusionist accidentally opened a partial portal for a demon lord and I had to find a way to prevent it from coming through, the time we tricked a batch of space pirates into bringing us a second jetcopter so we would be able to carry all of our equipment with us when we left to assault their main base.  I certainly don’t remember every moment of every game; I probably don’t even remember every life and death moment (particularly not in Gamma World, in which it seemed that life and death were a regular crisis, occurring several times per session).  But I do remember some moments.  What is it that makes these moments so memorable, so vivid?

In every case in which I can remember clearly the moments of the game, in which they come alive in my mind’s eye, there seem to be two factors at work:  setting and tension.  Both of these must be present in some measure; but more than that, they must somehow connect to each other.  That is, the moment must be tense, in that there must be something at risk to the characters; and the setting must be clear, described in terms that make it easy to visualize; but more than that, understanding the scene must be important to resolving the tension.

In the situation described above, in order to get my people across that canyon I had to make myself aware of the details.  Where were these crystal pillars?  Could we trace a path that would take us across?  What was the stuff growing in these caves?  Could we make bridges from it?  How hot was it here, and what could we do to mitigate that as a problem?  What else could we see in this cave that would help us?  Getting a complete picture of where we were enabled us to overcome the obstacles–and also left that image imprinted in our memories.

In another game, we were being pursued by mind flayers into a vast cavern, a home of myconids (fungus men) which was heavily overgrown with exotic underground plant life.  They were going to catch us; it was a matter of time.  So I ordered a battle plan that would split us into three groups and catch them in our midst–an ambush in which one group would be the bait and the other two the trap.  In order to do that, I had to see the lay of the land, the nature of the bush, and be able to plot it.  I still remember it, because I needed that visual information to succeed.

Another fight was inside a prefabricated building.  There were security cameras on the walls, and we were caught in a firefight around a corner in the halls.  The terrain was part of the battle–we had to maneuver so that we could all fire at them while maintaining some degree of cover for ourselves around the bend.  That image comes to mind.

Yes there are images in my mind that do not involve battle; but even then, the scene was important to success.  Trying to break into that compound in which we had that fire fight involved us in identifying security measures and countering them, disabling a security robot on regular rounds, doing reconnaissance from the roof of the building–in all, trying to visualize the situation because our character’s lives might be on the line.  The settings were not all unusual, but they all had memorable features; the situations were not all life-and-death, but they all had the feeling of danger.

So I think to create truly vivid memorable moments, bear these things in mind.  You need to describe a scene clearly enough that your players are able to visualize it; and you need to create a sense that the scene itself matters in a way that makes them pay attention to the details.  Those are the moments they will recall, of which they will say they were there.

[Next week, something different.]